Beyond Lampedusa. Heritage Tourism and Migration.pdf (original) (raw)

E.C. del Re and R.R. Laremont, eds., Pursuing stability and a shared development in Euro-Mediterranean migrations, Aracne, Roma, 2017, pp. 323-371

The Mediterranean refugees crisis, of which Lampedusa (Italy) has become a global symbol, entails an interesting cultural process showing the complex and controversial relationships between heritage, tourism and art industry. Political narratives, based on the importance of enhancing socio-cultural awareness of migration crisis, offer an effective cover to many of these operations. Migrants and refugees, and their bodies, tend to become objects of tourist and media gaze, though their real stories and memories are hardly taken into account. Ai Weiwei’s sophisticated installations with life jackets and rubber boats in Berlin, Vienna and Florence show the deep interrelation between media, marketing and cultural policies. In such a context the island of Lampedusa, where thousands and thousands of migrants and refugees strive to arrive by sea, has become the setting of movies, TV serials and documentaries, one of which was even proposed for the Oscar awards. The island also hosted the exhibition “Towards the Museum of the Mediterranean dialogue”, displaying objects of migrants dead during their journey, and an underwater exhibition with photos of migrants and refugees. In Lanzarote (Canary Islands, Spain) the underwater “Atlántico Museum”, inaugurated in 2016, exhibits the “Rift of Lampedusa”, a huge cement sculpture by Jason deCaires Taylor, representing a rubber boat crowded by migrants fleeing from North Africa. Among them there are also dead bodies. These cases are “good to think” the difficult relationship between tragedies, tourism and art industry, as well as between spectacularization of the sufferance, tourist gaze and cultural policies.